Girls and heroines

When my girls play with the Marvel Legends action figures, they fight over the female characters. (It was hell when all we had was the Black Widow.) When they talk about their favorite comic book characters (and apparently having a favorite is very important, and it's almost as important that you and your sister not have the same favorite), they always choose the women. Always.

I don't remember this from when I was a kid. The earliest "favorite character" I remember was the Human Torch, and he could fly and do all sorts of neat flame tricks (I loved Stan and Jack but the laws of physics weren't necessarily their strongest point). The Invisible Girl? She had to do all the cleaning. The others patronized her. And eventually she was a mom as well, which took her entirely out of the realm of characters I, as a young girl, would have identified with.

But my girls? They automatically gravitate toward the female characters. (Not, naturally, the Invisible Woman. She's still a mom, even if she does have more interesting powers these days.) There are more to choose from now, of course, particularly in the X-Men. And they get to do more interesting things. Maybe if there had been more interesting female characters when I was younger I would have focused more on them, but as it was I wasn't desperate enough for female role models to turn to Sue Storm or the Wasp, who were both pretty silly back then. (Seriously. I've been looking through some of the old Avengers--on DVD-ROM, whee!--and I lost track of the times Jan went on about breaking a nail or whatever.) And the male characters were so overprotective of them--Hank of Jan, Quicksilver of the Scarlet Witch, and the whole rest of the FF of Sue--which I found annoying even then; why would you wnat someone on your team that you didn't trust to do their job?

So I asked the 11-year-old today what she based it on when she said someone was her favorite. She generalized somewhat, saying that she usually prefers the Marvel heroes because they have more personality (granted that she has read more Marvel, including some of my old Claremont/Cockrum X-Men books, so I don't think her judgment there is necessarily informed). When I mentioned that she also seems to prefer the female characters, she didn't seem to think that that was a factor (other than the characters she likes happening to be women), and said "...I like Wolverine..." (So does her sister. Not sure what the deal is there. They also like Colossus, but only because of how he relates to Kitty.) It's obvious that she and her sister generally prefer the women, but it's apparently not a conscious choice. And there's more operating there--when they talk about the Teen Titans, the 11-year-old almost-a-teenager likes the deep, gothy Raven, while the 7-year-old prefers the lighter, more innocent Starfire.